Legislature Passes Education Budget, Providing $300 Million More to New York City

By MICHAEL COOPER and AL BAKER

Published: August 11, 2004

ALBANY, Aug. 10—
Lawmakers began passing the first pieces of the latest budget in New York State's history here on Tuesday by approving a bill on the issue that had confounded them all year: education spending.

But now that Gov. George E. Pataki and the State Legislature have missed the July 30 deadline for complying with a court order requiring them to fix New York City's schools, a mandate they called a ''historic opportunity'' for change, the education bill passed on Tuesday wound up looking more like business as usual.

The bill raises spending in rich districts as well as poor ones. While New York City will see an increase in state education aid, the $300 million more it is slated to get is not a record-breaking increase, and it is less than the amounts Governor Pataki, the State Senate and the State Assembly had proposed giving the city in their competing education plans earlier this year. And after a year of sometimes heated arguments about how to pay for increased education spending, the new bill identified no new revenues to finance additional aid to the city's schools. The Republicans' proposal to build more video gambling parlors apparently hit a brick wall.

Even as lawmakers, who are all facing re-election in November, talked up the bill, noting that it increases education spending by more than $740 million across the state, some rank-and-file legislators had trouble hiding their disdain as most voted for it.

Assemblywoman Barbara M. Clark, a Democrat from Queens, lamented from the floor that the spending bill ''doesn't do what we know is necessary.'' Assemblyman James N. Tedisco, an upstate Republican, derided it as ''a status quo budget.'' And Assemblyman Robert G. Prentiss, another upstate Republican, ticked off the percentage increase for school systems in his district, but complained about the process.

''We come from distinctly different constituencies, and it is important to represent this diversity and to air our differences,'' Mr. Prentiss said. ''But not to the point of unbreakable political gridlock.''

Many lawmakers and local officials expect the court to step in this year to change the way the state finances education, once three referees appointed by the court study the situation and make recommendations in the fall. But with school systems gearing up for the fall semester next month, the bill is likely to govern educational spending for the coming school year.

The roughly $300 million increase for New York City falls short of the proposals that the Democratic-led State Assembly, the Republican-led Senate, and Governor Pataki all made earlier this year. (While only the Assembly broke down its figures by district, calling for more than half a billion in new aid for the city this year, the Senate and the governor released five-year targets that came to more than $300 million a year.)

While many district superintendents said they were pleased to be getting spending increases, and with just enough time to set local property tax rates in the coming weeks, many education advocates said they were disappointed.

''It has an air of unreality that the Legislature today is passing a school aid budget as if the Campaign for Fiscal Equity court case never existed,'' said Regina Eaton, the executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education, which has been lobbying for more aid. ''The court said that we should fix the formula, but all this budget does is add a small amount of money into a broken formula.''

David Ernst, a spokesman for the state's school boards association, said that the bill would have seemed pretty good in a typical year, but that it came as a disappointment this year, when the bar was set high by expectations that the state would sharply increase spending to comply with the court order.

He said that it exacerbated the problems of the funding formulas. ''Our complaint is that this system takes inadequate notice of need, and the money does not follow need, it follows political need,'' he said.

''There is barely a nod in the direction of reform, as far as we can tell, and it is disappointing to us,'' he said. ''But far more importantly, it leaves, for another year, those kids in these disadvantaged schools laboring under this enormous handicap of nonadequate resources.''

Senate Democrats complained that the bill left New York City with roughly the same proportion of aid that it always got when compared with the rest of the state.

''Ten years of litigation and nine months of a budget holdout, and this is what we have to show for it?'' asked Senator Eric T. Schneiderman, a Manhattan Democrat.

Assemblyman Steven Sanders, a Democrat from Manhattan and chairman of the Assembly's education committee, said the bill would give New York City the fourth-largest increase in education aid in history. He said that the governor's original proposal would have resulted in a net loss of education aid for the city.

Mr. Sanders acknowledged the bills and the hopes raised by the lawsuit, which was brought by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity. ''A $300 million increase from my standpoint may be, in the context of C.F.E., a half a loaf,'' he said. ''But nonetheless, a $300 million increase is nothing to be sneezed at.''

And Senator Joseph L. Bruno, who leads the Senate's Republican majority, called the bill ''tremendous'' and said that he hoped local districts would use the increased aid to lower school property taxes.

Photo: Assemblyman Steven Sanders, a Democrat from Manhattan, said ''a $300 million increase is nothing to be sneezed at.'' (Photo by Stewart Cairns for The New York Times)